Lissie Maurus’ debut Catching a Tiger boasted venerable personnel—collaborators of Tom Waits and Modest Mouse, among others—some very pretty production flourishes that rewarded close listens, and the impressively yarling voice that got Lissie discovered, but in retrospect it’s easy to see how it got overlooked. Lissie, despite beginning her career working with the likes of DJ Morgan Page, sits squarely in the Hotel Café roster that’s nurtured the careers of the likes of Sara Bareilles, Ingrid Michaelson, and a pre-sales-singularity Adele—a substantial yet critically shrugged-at genre better known these days as "songs you probably heard on 'Grey’s Anatomy' or something once." This isn’t a criticism so much as fact: Had Catching a Tiger or follow-up Back to Forever been released in the '90s, when this sort of thing was as mainstream as pop got, Lissie might have been a star and would have deserved it. These days, unless you overload your pop with sugar like Rachel Platten or Sia, score a self-consciously "authentic" (and possibly uncredited) topline on, say, an Avicii song, or happen to be a man like Ed Sheeran or James Bay, pop-folk is a genre with a limited future.
Such are the concerns of "Hollywood," the first track proper on My Wild West, a theatrical piece of goodbye-to-all-that with the sort of "Lean on Me" piano riff and carefully studied lyric that could only be dreamed up by someone who’s spent too long in audition rooms. Its main flaw is familiarity. Each city generates its own artform templates for people leaving it, and just as New York’s is thinkpieces, Los Angeles’ is songs. You still can stand out from the California-sized morass of these songs; it just takes exuberant panache, a couple killer lines (the current champion: "fuck California, you made me boring"), or even just a career-long dedication to writing Hollywood songs until you win over the cliché by pure attrition. Lissie’s song is thoroughly competent, yet says nothing beyond L.A. being a place where dreams happen or don’t, and where "running wild" means maybe not telling your mother you’ve gone clubbing a few times.
My Wild West, Lissie’s first album on her own label, is full of these sturdily crafted but MOR songs. The titular conceit—complete with "overture"—threatens an album of self-conscious cowpunk à la Miss Derringer, or perhaps the Americana equivalent of Eat, Pray, Love. Fortunately, the album’s neither of those but comfort-food acoustic pop; unfortunately, this makes it significantly less interesting. Lissie’s voice has settled into a sedate, plainspoken croon, somewhere between Sheryl Crow and Ashley Monroe, or at times like Sia when she sounds like she’s gulping down a faceful of air with every syllable.
And while Lissie remains a fine songwriter—the overture in particular is actually pretty compelling in a spaghetti-western way—she takes few risks here. "Wild West" is, on the one hand, an eminently competent single, one that builds from quiet, prayer-like verse to a full-throated folk-rocker where the kick drums stomp and the guitars practically yodel. But it’s also a worn formula, up to and including that wearisome "hey!" the Lumineers injected into seemingly every folk or pop song of this decade. Similarly, the brass-and-acoustic "Hero" conjures up a nice dustscape that, when it leads only to "I could've been a hero, I could've been a zero," comes off as a mere set piece, with tumbleweeds blown by wind machines. (Also: "I want my 40 acres in the sun" is maybe not the most appropriate metaphor.) "Sun Keeps Risin’" even drops in a couple dozen instances of a stock coyote sample to belabor the metaphor, which is cool unless you’ve heard that exact sample somewhere else. (And if you have, you’ll spend the entire song trying to think of where, as the music slips too easily into the background.)
Like most of Lissie’s albums, My Wild West is most compelling at its most messy and raucous. "Daughters" has one of Lissie’s most passionate vocals and a wonderfully crunchy bridge; it’s one of two tracks on the album that feel exciting. The other is "Go for a Walk," a weird, meandering little track, mostly solo acoustic save for a few playful electric guitar skips. It’s reminiscent of Fiona Apple’s "Waltz (Better Than Fine)"—another track toward the end of its album that feels unplanned and refreshing, like a slice of life that just happened to get set to music. It’s the closest thing on My Wild West that sounds like "going rogue in the wild, wild West," anyway; leaving Hollywood behind is one thing, but better yet is leaving behind the old familiar sets.
